Under the Duvet: Shoes, Reviews, Having the Blues, Builders, Babies, Families and Other Calamities by Marian Keyes

Author:Marian Keyes [Keyes, Marian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Fiction, General, Women, Literary Collections, Essays, Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0060562080
Google: QF-tcPTH1toC
Amazon: B000FCKL66
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2004-01-06T00:28:41+00:00

Reversing Around Corners

Some time ago I wrote about how I was learning to drive. I wasn’t very good but I was doing my best, so when Barbara, my driving instructor, suggested that I apply for a driving test, I decided I might as well. Anyway, the waiting lists were so long I’d somehow managed to convince myself that driving tests – like being abducted by aliens – only happened to other people.

Until one day a couple of months ago a manila envelope arrived for me. Unawares, I opened it, thinking it was probably just another narky letter from the tax office. But one glance at the page in front of me changed everything. I saw two words: ‘Driving’ and ‘Test’. Suddenly I heard a roaring in my ears. The page fluttered from my fingers. Everything went black and I knew no more.

When I came to, I appeared to be in considerable distress and yelling about being ‘picked on’. I had every intention of cancelling the test. Faking a broken leg or something. Then I faced facts – I was going to have to do it at some stage, it might as well be now. ‘You won’t pass it,’ Tadhg confidently assured me. ‘But it’ll be good practice for you.’

Right.

I hadn’t been a bad driver over the preceding few months. But from the moment I knew I’d be sitting my test four weeks hence, I turned into a quivering disaster. I stalled every five yards. I forgot to take the hand brake off. I turned on the windscreen wipers when I wanted to indicate.

And everyone I spoke to had a test horror story.

Julie, the girl who waxes my legs, told me about a friend of hers who’d knocked down and killed a dog during her test. ‘Isn’t that awful?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Did she pass?’ She didn’t.

Someone else had done their three-point turn on a road where they were cutting down tree branches, and got half a tree tangled up in their undercarriage, which caused the car to cut out. They didn’t pass either.

Goaded on by my fear of failure, I signed up for hundreds more driving lessons. I managed to get Barbara. I liked her and she seemed to like me. Just as well – we were going to be seeing an awful lot of one another.

Unfortunately, I’d managed to pick up loads of bad habits: cruising in neutral the last hundred yards or so to the traffic lights; never ever using my rear-view mirror because I was only interested in what I was driving towards and had no interest at all in what was behind me. And another side-effect of the forthcoming test was that I totally lost the ability to distinguish between left and right.

‘Take the next left,’ Barbara would say.

‘Right you are,’ I’d reply heartily, flicking on the windscreen wipers and moving into the right-hand lane.

I had lesson after lesson, and some days I thought I detected an improvement and other days it was clear I’d been hallucinating.

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